He cites a published study that “…broke down the shooters into three classifications: expert, intermediate, and novice. Experts had either finished the academy shooting course or had been trained in the military while intermediates had no formal academy training but had shot before in either recreational settings or had military rifle training. Finally, the novices were just that. Many of them had never even held a gun in their lives.”

You can see the problem already, right? Military handgun training, outside of a handful of job descriptions, is laughable. The handgun training from a typical LE academy is better than that, but still unlikely to turn out any pistol wizards, either.

Then comes the part that doesn’t automatically follow, which is that us non-po-po shoot better than that. Well, we probably do… assuming we’re an active competitive shooter and/or have had some formal training ourselves.

But as far as the general run of the mill shooting public? I go to the public shooting range. A lot. I see how the general shooting public shoots. It’s not very well. The average shooter at a public range finds the 7 ring of a B-27 at seven yards to be a less than clout shot.

I am not a very good shooter. I’m the special ed student at gun school. When I walk the prize table at a match, I find myself wondering if the tablecloth is not the most valuable thing left on the table, since I already have a Bore Snake and a three ounce bottle of CLP. But when I go to the public range of a weekend? I’m almost always a veritable ninja compared to the shooters on my right and left.

The average shooter is never presented with an opportunity to find out how bad they are, because things like scores and timers are foreign to their experience. It is possible to go to the range monthly for years and years and never see any meaningful improvement because it’s hard to improve that which you do not measure. There’s a lot of Dunning-Kruger in the shooting world.

It’s worth noting that Dr. Dunning’s solution to the cognitive bias experienced by novices that bears his name is to do exactly what Tamara Keel recommends here.

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It’s funny in a lot of ways. I feel like I a lot of folks who know nothing about firearms, but try to dictate policy and tell me what I “need”, have this assumption that police (and most military, for that matter) get some kind of special sauce training that everyone else doesn’t. They use that as justification to limit my choices on things.

They have no concept about how little actual training most “professionals” get. Granted, the average gun owner who never practices isn’t very good, either.

It all comes down to the individual initiative and how much practice each person wants to put in, regardless of their background.

>> It all comes down to the individual initiative and how much practice each person wants to put in, regardless of their background.

Most definitely this. What I’ve found most maddening is that nearly every military unit and police department could see improvement without increasing their current budget (ammo, range time, and money) if they bothered to motivate personnel to do so. A minimal bit of intelligent of dry practice (as in 10-20 minutes per week) would do it. Coupled with a better-organized approach to range use and qualification (hint, shooting a qual is not training) would raise qual rates drastically.